azeem.azhar

Is The Times paywall working?

The Observer today reports on a significant drop in The Times’ traffic since the launch of its paywall.
The Experian data it reports is much richer and shows the following data:

• Overall drop in visits of 66%
• Linger time drops from 5 minutes to 3.5 minutes

The question is–and not touched on–in the Observer piece is whether this is a good or bad outcome.

It’s early days to make a call. But my judgement:

• Linger time for people who don’t bounce off the paywall has probably increased. Times probably has a much larger number of people seeing one page only (the paybarrier).
• The drop in visits it far lower than I would have expected. The net sentiment was that a drop would be precitipitous–like 95% or more. To have only seen a drop of 60 or 70% actually leaves traffic at The Times an order of magnitude higher than some predictions.

The Times was seeing about 20m visits a month, call it 5m unique users per month. If conversion rates to paid are really running at 33% (with a 66% of traffic declining), then the times will be looking at 1.5m subscriptions. At the promotion rate of £1 for 30 days, that works out at £1.5m in revenues.

If they hold on to 50% of those users after the initial trial, then they’ll run to 750k subs at £100 per year or £75m a year.

If they hold on to 10%, then it is a paltry £15m a year.

Replete with assumptions but it shows the fine balance. At 750k paying subscribers, the subscription revenue, together with higher advertising yields might become material.

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• Early Indications Say Paywall For The Times Is A Dreadful Failure (techdirt.com)

Popularity: 11% [?]

We’ve been working on our noise filters at Viewsflow, hunting down ‘bad’ Twitter accounts the look good. This afternoon’s exercise left me relatively surprised at how bot-rich Twitter is. Looking at a couple of hundred accounts which were regularly sharing high quality links, we found these (approximate) proportions:

Now I figured there were a lot of bots on Twitter but what is clear that there are a lot of bots on Twitter, reposting content from feeds of various sites. Broadly speaking there appeared to be three different types

1. Republishing feeds which slice and dice other feeds in, presumably, interesting ways – make up a tiny minority; one might assume their is a segment of the audience interested in them.
2. Out-and-out megaphones: Twitter accounts which pull off reliable sources, like the WSJ or FT rss feed, and ping meticulously on the hour
3. ‘Social media experts’: You can tell by their twitter backgrounds (with the phone numbers on the left), who appear to be part of some mutual back linking exercise. They are 90% retweet, some smartly trying to retweet what looks like a Google Alerts feed, and 10% ‘thanks for following’.

Twitter is spotting rogue accounts. A couple of accounts (not shown in the pie chart had been suspended by Twitter).
The most popular Twitter clients were for the bot accounts were twitterfeed and Hootsuite.
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Popularity: 23% [?]

Sixty per cent of my time is spent with customers, forty per cent with investors, thirty per cent with my team and thirty per cent doing work. The result is a busy schedule made easier by these ten great products.

1. Pzizz on iPhone : totally essential. Pzizz is a power napping application which I have been using since it was an app on the Mac

Builds unique sleep environments, allow for refreshing 15 minute power naps during the day. Sadly usually only have time for one every other day.

2. Docscanner on iPhone : constantly running around, so you never have the paper work you need when you are near a fax or scanner. And vice-versa. Docscanner takes better than average photos of documents and then allows you to transform them into scans that are acceptable to lawyers and bankers.
3. Berghaus Extrem Incinerator Duvet: London has been freezing these past two months, and I have done much more walking and running around in this wet, snowy city than I would like. My Incinerator Duvet jacked has kept me warm and dry. Plus doubles as an sensory-isolation chamber during power naps. (You need to see it to believe it.)
4. Quaker porridge oats : Eaten on most mornings to get me through to at least eleven am.
5. Sharemyplaylists : Great for finding a suitable playlist for late night working sessions. Something laid back for writing presentations, some more thumping for building a training set for one of our modules.
6. Dropbox : Just have to add my entrepreneur love for Dropbox.
7. Xpad : Very simple Mac App for keeping scratch notes. Autosaves, but sadly doesn’t sync easily across Dropbox.
8. Chartbeat / Analytics App / Server Density : three apps that help us stay on top of our site performance and uptime. Chartbeat has become completely essential, but Analytics App which is an iPhone app for grabbing headling Google Analytics data during the day. David Mytton’s server density is a useful Nagios-as-a-service.
9. Blackberry Bold : Great device for writing emails, to dos and tweets, while carrying a laptop bag in the order hand. Unlike my iPhone I can pretty much navigate this with one hand, while walking/running. It also functions really well in 2G mode, giving me better-than-odds chance of reaching 10pm with a mobile phone that still has batteries.
10. iPhone tethering: When it works, money saving. No more £10 trips to Starbucks just to pull a presentation or check something online.

Number 11 … of course there is a number 11.

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Popularity: 100% [?]

After a fascinating Seedsummit, this weekend brought the other extreme of start-up investing: Spinvox’s alleged fire sale to Nuance for £92m.

Some people have been asking how £92m could be seen as a fire sale? And how come, according to the Sunday Times, Christina Domecq will end up with nothing?

The answer is simple: Spinvox had raised between £120 and £150m in capital, most recently in a series of very tough bridging loans. These totalled some £73m in various loan instruments to Tilsbury, according to the Register.

Most of these loans would have attracted high interest rates, as Spinvox would neither have had the assets for collateral or cashflow to service loan payments. (Spinvox’s revenus next year were forecast at £7m, according to The Times.)

Loans are senior to equity, meaning that on a disposable of the company bondholders receive their money in full before equity holders see any. £92m does not go very far when Spinvox was holding as much debt as it did.

Is this an achievement? You be the judge. Turning £150m of investors capital into £92m is an achievement in some (very rare) circumstances.

As to the executives, well they rightly would have held the lowest class of shares-to be paid out after everyone who has actually taken financial risk (i.e. put real pounds and pence on the line) has been paid out.

There are a two lessons here for many of the parties involved:

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Popularity: 48% [?]

Tweetmeme, Nick Halstead’s Twitter  pulse-o-meter, seems to be the most popular UK-originated website in the US, according to Compete.com

His six-man firm has overtaken the BBC and The Guardian (as well as Web 2.0 superstars bebo and Wayn) to hit quite extra-ordinary reach numbers in the US.

In fact, Tweetmeme is now the 87th most popular website in the US, ahead of wsj.com and closing in on heavy-hitters like Linked In.

(For those who can’t read the above data, in July 2009, Compete measured the monthly reach of Tweetmeme at 11.9m visitors; the BBC at 8.4m visitors.)

Fantastic to see the potential for a great local success in a core ‘Internet infrastructure’ play. Well done Nick.

[update] Another positive datapoint for tweetmeme is that it’s daily attention is growing relative to Digg and Reddit, the other main meme-aggregators.

[update 2] As several twitters have pointed out , the bulk of these visits may be from the distribution of the Tweetmeme button and not visits to the www.tweetmeme.com website. But that, fundamentally, isn’t the point. Nick’s business (like so many internet businesses) depends on reach x monetisation of that reach.

Nick has found/chosen a distributed strategy that gets him massive reach at extremely low cost. Seems like a good strategy to follow, since he doesn’t control several TV and radio stations which he can use to push his website. In fact, he seems to have persuaded more than 7,000 sites to embed the tweetmeme buttons (bearing in mind that *.wordpress.com and *.blogger.com count as 1 site each).

By page views, the Compete counts the BBC at 250m per month, Tweetmeme at 112m per month, and the Graun and Telegraph at 25m or so per month. At current rate of growth Tweetmeme will hit 300m page impressions per month in August.

And as @yiannopolous has pointed out, Tweetmeme is growing faster than twitter. Given the heavy usage of Twitter by clients, there is a good chance that the total reach of Tweetmeme will exceed that of Twitter as measured by Compete in August. (Says more about Compete’s methodology than anything else.)

From the perspective of Internet entrepreneurs in the UK, it is an awesome result. Tweetmeme has a chance to become part of the fabric of the Internet, the way that Wikipedia or Urchin or Oingo or Amazon are now part of the fabric of the Internet. Fabric in the sense that they are the defacto way of doing something. The last time a British project did this was the IMDB, which was acquired buy Amazon in 1998. The IMDB is now the movie-information layer in the Internet stack. The time before that was when a chap called Berners-Lee overlayed HTTP on the TCP/IP stack.

Popularity: 53% [?]

So Bing may or may not be better than Google, whatever better means. What does better mean?

The trouble is that I love Google and I love the language and tone it uses. They have thought exceptionally hard about how it needs to sound. In the same way Apple thought exceptionally hard about every key on the iPhone. Bing looks like it has been tested to destruction by product marketers, segmenting and segmenting away.

But here are three really easy tricks to make Bing ‘beat’ Google:

1. Allow me access to my Google apps: I use GMail, Gcal and a whole lot of other G’s. Bing tries to force me to change tons of my usage paradigms by sticking a link to Hotmail and Microsoft Maps on its toolbar. The absurdity. It is a lot easier to get me to change search engines than get me to change every other part of my life. Don’t force me to swap an entire user experience when Hotmail doesn’t hold a candle to Gmail.I want to be able to click to my mail from my searchengine, and ideally from my search engine to my mail. (The latter might be harder–possible a Firefox extension or greasemonkey script).

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Popularity: 32% [?]

I put together a quick Bing vs Google review. I find Bing a bit ‘meh’ to be honest. Nothing in their that is radically better. And unfortunately, hard to see how Bing will get consumers to switch to using it for some of their searches while continuing to use Google for others.

I tried to embed the review but couldn’t. Find it here.

Also very suprised that Bing have chosen to ape but not clone/copy Google’s UI despite hard evidence that people just prefer Google’s look and feel even when the results are served up by MSN or Yahoo.

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Popularity: 50% [?]

Alan Patrick raised the per-weekly question of Twitter’s business model: how and when will it make money?

Now, as a quick aside on web20nomics, I am encouraged by Facebook‘s ability to make money, heading towards $550m this year on 250m users, which isn’t a bad monetisation rate for a business without a business model (as it was described in 2007).

As monetisation rates go, it ain’t bad: $2-3 per user per year. On it’s current user base of 250m, if Facebook could triple their monetisation per user (which would put them below Yahoo), they would be a $1.6bn revenue company, which makes Yuri Milner’s call today a smart one.

But at least an order of magnitude off Google’s, which is between $40 and $80 per user per annum.

With Twitter heading north of 30m monthly users, monetisation rates as good as Facebook’s, Twitter would be making close to $10m per month, which ought to pay the electricity bills. The question is how?

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Popularity: 17% [?]

Hey the TrueKnowledge firefox plug in is really cool.

Essentially it allows Google to give direct answers to questions you ask.

I did a screencast here.

Popularity: 11% [?]

This may be really obvious but… while playing around with Google voice search on my iPhone and Bold I noticed something: I had a cognitive lock.

Speaking into the handset the only queries that came to mind were classic local queries. ‘Pizza restaurant W2′, ‘Cycle repair, NW3′. I tried very hard to come up with a ‘classic Google query’ (something I do from time to time on my Bold). And it was hard, it felt wrong, to be speaking into the phone and not asking a local query. Even when I tried a tech query I came up with ‘Apple dealership’ (which Google Voice on the Bold handily turns into a local query).

Somehow it doesn’t seem right to be querying ‘Cool wordpress modules’ through my headset….

Popularity: 2% [?]